Porcino is pleased to announce the opening of its third exhibition, Daniel Santiago, an invisible portrait.

Porcino is a parasitic gallery located in a hole underneath the floorboards of Chert Gallery in Berlin. Actually, that is not true at all, not at all. Porcino is actually a mycorrhizal gallery located in a hole underneath the floorboards of Chert Gallery. Like the Boletus Edulis and the conifer tree, Porcino and Chert form a symbiotic relationship, their roots and mycelium intertwined with each other as gifts are exchanged for each organism’s continuous survival. It was founded in 2012 by David Horvitz during his first exhibition at the gallery.

Daniel Santiago (born 1939, Recife Brazil) is known for his association with Mail Art, and particularly for his collaborations with friend Paulo Brusky. His work is a playful and often humorous exploration of the poetics of the everyday, whether through capturing the cultural landscape of his surroundings in drawing, or by intervening in the public space of the city with performances and installations. Santiago’s work touches on philosophical questions about solitude, life and freedom, inventiveness as a strategy of survival and the potential of collaborating with others.

A photograph of me crying early in the morning on the beach in the far rockaways that is placed onto the english wikipedia page for mood disorder and then used by various websites as a free stock. David Horvitz. Shelter Press.

About the book
As the title said : « A photograph of me crying early in the morning on the beach in the far rockaways that is placed onto the english wikipedia page for mood disorder and then used by various websites as a free stock ».

About the artist
Horvitz uses art books, photography, performance art, watercolor, and mail art to create his work. His work includes « A Wikipedia Reader, » a mind map of artists browsing of Wikipedia, and « Public Access, » photographs of beaches uploaded to Wikipedia. His published work includes: Xiu Xiu: The Polaroid Project (2007), Everything that can happen in a day (2010), and Sad, Depressed, People (2012). He has exhibited at SF Camerawork, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, Tate Modern

In 2009 + 2010 Californian artist David Horvitz drove up the entire California coast with various friends. The trip started at the beach just north of the Mexican American border and ended in Oregon at Pelican State Beach. Along the way Horvitz made photographs of over 50 different state beaches. In each photograph he stood anonymously on the sand looking out at the ocean, reminiscent of Bas Jan Ader or Caspar David Friedrich. The photographs were then uploaded to each of the specific beach’s Wikipedia page to illustrate the articles. An example is Borderfield State Park. His intention was for these images to become the visual meta data for the specific beaches, and for the images to openly circulate as they are sourced and resourced online. At one point a discussion emerged on Wikipedia discussing the legitimacy of his photographs. This resulted with many of the photographs being deleted. This is the second book of the Public Access project. It contains photographs, scans of Wikipedia articles, and the complete conversation from Wikipedia discussing Horvitz’s image. It also contains various texts written by Horvitz about the project, as well as personal stories about the California coast. This project was originally commissioned by SF Camerawork for an exhibition with the writer Ed Steck (a close friend of Horvitz). A new version Steck’s text concludes the publication. This was designed by Miya Osaki. Read more about Public Access on Rhizome.

David Horvitz’s Sad, Depressed, People looks at a set of images circulating within stock photography collections. These photographs, in which actors are photographed holding their heads in their hands, ostensibly depressed, are here shown to contain a bizarre tension between their status as stock images and their supposedly emotional content.